High Price

raise the child I knew I had in a middle-class, two-parent family. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do. Once I got over my initial shock, I was appalled to think about what it must have been like for my son to grow up without ever knowing his father. It really got me thinking about how I’d managed to thrive despite lacking those advantages.
    I’d wanted to teach my children everything I hadn’t known as I grew up with a struggling single mother, surrounded by people whose lives were limited by their own lack of knowledge. I wanted them to go to good schools, to know how to negotiate the potential pitfalls of being black in the United States, to not have to live and die by whether they were considered “man” enough on the street. I also wanted to illustrate by my own example that bad experiences like those I had as a child aren’t the defining factor in being authentically black.
    Now I had learned that one of my own children—a boy, whose name I learned was Tobias—had grown up for sixteen years in the same way I had, but without any of the hard-earned knowledge I could now offer.
    Later, I’d discover as well that he’d taken the very path I feared most. He had dropped out of high school and fathered several children with different women. He had sold drugs and allegedly shot someone. What could I tell my sons about how I’d escaped from the streets? Could my experience and knowledge help change Tobias’s downward trajectory? How did I really manage to go from being one of the black kids in the auxiliary trailer for those with “learning difficulties” in elementary school to being an Ivy League professor?
    Though I now regret much of this behavior, like my newfound son I’d sold drugs, I’d carried guns. I’d had my share of fun with the ladies. I’d deejayed in the skating rinks and gyms of Miami performing with rappers like Run-DMC and Luther Campbell in their early gigs, ducking when people started shooting. I’d seen the aftermath of what the police call a “drug-related” homicide up close for the first time when I was just twelve years old; I lost my first friend to gun violence as part of the same chain of events. Indeed, my cousins Michael and Anthony had stolen from their own mother, and I had attributed this abhorrent behavior to their “crack cocaine addictions.” I saw what happened as crack first took hold in Miami’s poorest black communities. Falling for media interpretations and street myths about all of these experiences had originally misled and misdirected me. Some of that, as we shall see, may ironically have helped me at certain times. But more often, it was a distraction, one that prevented me and so many others in my community from learning how to think critically.
    So how could I now in good conscience study this scourge of a drug, even offer it to my own people in the laboratory? In the grand scheme of things, what was really so different between what I was doing in my research and what was likely to get Tobias arrested on the street?
    The answers lie in my story and the science, which reveal the untold truth about the real effects of drugs and the choices we make about them as a society. By exploring how these myths and social forces shaped my childhood and career, we can strip away the misinformation that actually drives so-called drug epidemics and leads us to take actions that harm the people and communities we presumably intend to help.

CHAPTER 1
    Where I Come From
    This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. . . . We’ve had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.
    — MAXINE WATERS
    T he sounds were what got to me: my father shouting, “I’ll kill yo ass”; my mother shrieking; the sickening thump of flesh hitting flesh, hard. I had been playing board games—probably Operation or something like that—with three of my sisters in the bedroom I shared with my youngest brother, Ray. He was three, too young to play, but I was watching him, keeping him out of trouble. The fierce Miami sun was setting and we could tell the fighting was getting worse because my parents had moved from their bedroom, where they tried to keep things private, into the living room, where anything went.
    It was a Friday or Saturday night and I was six years old.
    Soon we could hear large objects being thrown against the walls, glass shattering, long, piercing screams. I had